King Pet, by Gao Ming Ltd (Never heard of it, but oh well...) is one of the more
expensive tamagotchi knock-offs, at $20.00 Canadian. At the time, I was seduced by the
"Two free extra batteries with purchase" sign.
An 8-in-1 v-pet, you can choose from (and I quote):
This is my third stab at a non-tam(agotchi) virtual pet. I already have Sanrio's Pocket Love (Clear Blue Heart version), as well as a Virtual Penguin Pet, Penpy, by UNION. Since Penpy turned out to have a faulty timer, and Pocket Love turned out to be unpauseable, I am looking forward to playing with this v-pet with a bit of trepidation.
Slightly bigger than a tam. Mine is an Dark Blue Egg-shaped version, with little illustrations
of the animal characters around the edges, but the instructions indicate that Duck shape, Fish
shape, and Heart shapes also exist. The screen appears to be larger than a tam screen, and
the background image is a pink and blue swirl.
There are five icons each on the top and bottom edges of the screen.
The illustrations around the outside of the screen are quite crude/ugly, except for the
dinosaur and frog. Hopefully I will be able to scratch them off accidentally-on-purpose.
The chain is a beaded one, like the original Japanese tams, but it's quite stiff.
Same sort of packaging as the Tamagotchi, with the following "caution" on the back:
PRINCIPLE
(NOTE: All the words in quotation marks are quoted verbatim from the "opearations instructions" booklet.)
For the panda, the food is bamboo and the "nibble" appears to be a bunch of grapes.
For the frog, the food is some sort of winged insect, and the "nibble" is a beetle.
For the alien, the food comes in a flip-top can with an "M" on it, and the "nibble"
looks like a mutant mushroom.
The penguin eats an angelfish? and some icecream.
The dog eats dog food in a bowl, and a bone.
The Dinosaur eats a drum-stick and a carrot.
The cat eats a fish, different from the penguin's, and also what looks like a black
lollipop.
The pet changes into a baby-chi face when eating until age 4 for the panda and age 3 for the frog, when it reaches its adult form.
1 meal = 2 kgs weight gain, 1 "nibble" = 1 kg weight gain.
(3 "lives". When they are used up, i.e., when you have been hit 3 times, the game ends.)
Each game, whether played through to the end or aborted, causes 1 kg weight loss.
(Best out of 5, appears to be a card game)
The music is the same as the Penpy Virtual Pet.
1 game that's won = 1 kg weight loss (Possibly, not sure), 0.5 units of happiness.
When showing emotion, the panda head turns into the head and upper body of a giant panda; usually it just looks like a puppy with black ears. The King Pet has a tendency to get stuck on the final card face, and will freeze the screen while emitting a horrible screech.
Unfortunately it doesn't appear to beep when "screaming unreasonably", so you have to check it regularly.
Unlike the other quotes, I don't find this particularly funny. I just thought "Weather" needed some explanation. The King Pet emits a blip-blip noise when the weather changes, and the appropriate icon (hat, umbrella) is already highlighted.
A little man on a bulldozer shows up, and a greatly enlarged poop appears in the middle of the screen, only to be swept away. You can only sweep away one poop at a time.
I initially debated whether to choose the penguin or the panda as the starting character;
I felt that dogs, cats, chickens, aliens, and dinosaurs had been done to death as virtual pets,
and I didn't feel all that passionate about raising a frog.
But on December 10th, 1997, at about 9:30, I selected the panda. Immediate the stork
(or pelican, it was hard to tell) appeared on screen, flapping its wings and opening and closing
its beak on a little panda head. Shortly afterwards, a bouncing decapitated panda head, sans
black eye-mask, appeared on screen. I planned to update this page with information I found on
the panda form, and to later supplement it with information on the dog, cat, alien and so forth;
unfortunately, it turned out that KingPet had a tendency to go haywire and suddenly speed up,
and it became impractical to do a serious study of it. Observations on KingPet can be found in
My Virtual Pet Diaries. Below are observations I attempted
to make, in the oh-so-naive days I spent working with KingPet, blissfully unaware of his
timer glitch.
The nice thing about this pet is that it wakes up at 8:00am and goes to bed at 9:00 am, which is practically the same as my own sleeping/waking pattern. I don't know how this will work in conjunction with my 8:30 classes, though...
Another neat thing is that the poo/urinating icons seem to show up as tiny icons on the sides of the screen, so that you can still see everything. Tams, on the other hand, can get crowded off their own screen by their, uh, souvenirs.
Also, when button A and B are pressed simultaneously, the King Pet apparently pauses all
functions except the timer. I'll have to investigate this as well...
*sigh*
I keep getting this paranoid feeling that the Chinese Instructions on the other side
have better, more detailed instructions, but since I can only read English, Japanese, some
French, even less Spanish, a smidgen of Klingon, a pinch of Kiwi and Emu (I try to have a
rudimentary knowldege of all the flightless bird languages) and three major dialects of
Aptenodytian (Southern Aptenodytian, Middle Pygoscelese and Megadyptian Snow Angels), I am at
a loss.
Okay, so I don't have any operators standing by. But I will thank you profusely and give you credit on my page. Okay?
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Copyrights for Tamagotchi, Tamagotch, Tam, Tama, and all of the character names, images, animations and likenesses thereof belong to the Bandai Company of Japan or Bandai America, except where noted. All other trademarks belong to whatever company I said owned them unless I'm totally mistaken. All of the images are used without permission, 'coz I'm just that kinda shameless scum.